UNCOMMONLY WILD: THE CONTEST FOR WARSAW’S WISLA RIVER An NCEEER Working Paper by Eunice Blavascunas, SERC Institute and Benjamin Cope, European Humanities University of Vilnius National Council for Eurasian and East European Research University of Washington Box 353650 Seattle, WA 98195 [email protected] http://www.nceeer.org/ TITLE VIII PROGRAM Project Information* Principal Investigator: Eunice Blavascunas NCEEER Contract Number: 826-07g Date: September 5, 2012 Copyright Information Individual researchers retain the copyright on their work products derived from research funded through a contract or grant from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER). 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Neither NCEEER nor the United States Government nor any recipient of this Report may use it for commercial sale. * The work leading to this report was supported in part by contract or grant funds provided by the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, funds which were made available by the U.S. Department of State under Title VIII (The Soviet-East European Research and Training Act of 1983, as amended). The analysis and interpretations contained herein are those of the author. Executive Summary This paper looks at how the Wisła River in central Warsaw became a site for articulating notions of the wild and the commons in postsocialist urban spaces. It asks what kind of commons might emerge in a semi-natural urban space fashioned out of informal networks and practices both at the level of the state and at the level of the everyday tactics used for ‘getting-by’ by the inhabitants of the space. By bringing the commons and the wild into focus within the urban space this paper argues that there are emergent conditions of activism and governance at work. The complex configurations in which the river flows means that it is a space where different, mutually contradictory modes of usage and governmental obligations come into contact. The contours of this story defy common divisions between private and public, between dissident environmentalists and a city/developer nexus, and between what ‘wild’ might means as opposed to “usable green space.” Different logics about governance and use come into play depending on how the ‘wild’ river is acting. Introduction The commons and the wild are two confusing and understudied categories in postsocialist Europe. This is true particularly in the urban context where public sentiment pivots on two related notions: 1.) state owned land produced a tragedy of the commons during the socialist period, with polluted and pillaged natural spaces, a context in which no one felt enfranchised as common user, and 2.) A wild space in the city center is symptomatic of the postsocialist city’s inability to properly modernize and invites technocratic solutions to overcome this “problem.” This article examines synergies between public access and use of the ‘wildlands’ of Warsaw’s Wisła River space in light of spectacular developments.1 We look at how the Wisła River in central Warsaw became a site for articulating notions of the wild and the commons. Our goal is 1.) to explore the variety of dynamics at work in the river space in Warsaw and whether and why this might lead to this space being considered a commons 2) to present empirical examples of attempts to govern the dynamic publicly owned river space, and how this leads to an unstable notion of the commons and 3.) to develop an intellectual framework for understanding how the commons and the wild might be analyzed in postsocialist urban spaces. When in Warsaw you hear that the Wisła River front is singular in Europe for the single reason that there is so much undeveloped open space along the river, both green and concrete. Until spring 2011 forest and a thicket of impenetrable shrub defined the Praga side of the river (right bank). When seen from the city centre, not just the river bank but Praga itself had symbolized the wild and dangerous social environment of an unmodernized and highly criminalized workers’ neighbourhood on the other side of the river. Across from Praga, however, the river was also not a tight part of the city centre attractions. On the left bank, a cement 1 Following Pole’s name for the river this paper uses the Polish word Wisła for what is known in English as the Vistula. Uncommonly Wild 1 bulwark and road separated buildings from the river, and on both sides of the river there were neglected ports, occupied semi-legally by house boat squatters and gardeners. The river space’s proximity to strategic investments meant that it was never just a bounded space, which conflicting constituencies fought for. The river space was part of a strategic geography for how Warsaw would reinvent itself twenty years into its capitalist adventure, a period that saw rapid wealth accumulation and a stunning pace of infrastrucutural developments. The biophysicality of the river in Warsaw played a significant role in how Warsaw could develop. Due to frequent floods and a shallow sandy bottom, the river’s ecological attributes complicated its use as both a commons and stopped the space from being effectively privatized. The space was simultaneously undeveloped, polluted, wild, and a potential source of cultural and ecological wealth to revitalize the city, if only the river could be managed and improved while still being called “wild.” To most Warsaw residents the Wisła River had not been thought of as a natural gem symbolic of the city’s identity. The NGO, Ja Wisła (I, the Wisła), summed up the challenges to bringing the river back to life in a 2009 outdoor exhibit about the river’s history, “Today the shore of the Wisła is empty. Polluted for decades the river no longer attracts Varsovians. Navigation disappeared and water sports centers are hardly existent. The concrete encased waterside is not used as a boulevard or harbor. The beaches are covered with rubbish and debris and overgrown with bushes. The river is narrowed by ferroconcrete dams and it’s become furrowed, therefore ports dry up in the summer.” Hardly the image of a wild river nor a space desirable for use, Ja Wisła portrayed the river this way in an attempt to turn the fate of the river around, to invite Varsovians to its shores and to reanimate its waterways. They were one of many groups competing to manage the river space, a point we will explore later in this article. Uncommonly Wild 2 In the last few years the city and developers roundly began referring to the river’s natural attributes as a cultural resource in an attempt to make Warsaw a livable, world class city, particularly in its bid to be the 2016 European city of culture. One development billboard invited resident’s to buy its luxury lofts using language that belied Ja Wisła’s summation. “Everything is flowing. The new Powiśle Development grows along the banks of the Wisła, Poland’s longest and most important river, the last natural European river.” And it is in the name of ecology, of the space’s value as a nesting place for migrating birds, that another language could be found in legal terms to protest against city planning decisions and private investment plans that seem to contradict notions of public access and development. Designated as a NATURA 2000 site for its importance as a bird breeding habit the river would assume new importance through a 3.5 million “Euro Life +” grant, co-managed by the bird protection group STOP ( Stołeczne Towarzystwo Ochrony Ptaków). The grant would radically alter the forested thicket along the Praga bank, formalizing trails, restoring breeding habitat for birds, constructing artificial floating islands and bulldozing vegetation to create beaches. Yet the lay observer often couldn’t separate what was being done in the name of bird protection, the creation of public beaches, flood control or development. Moreover, technocratic experts also obfuscated answers to these questions. Shifts in the desirability of the river timed with spectacular developments in the vicinity of the river banks. A former stadium for international petty trading was torn down and rebuilt for the 2012 European Football Championship games. The city sold development rights to its two underused and green- lined ports targeting them for massive office and living structures. A new Copernicus Science Center was built on the bank directly across from the Praga wildland, spending more than 100 million zloty (244 million Euros) to transform a cracked cement Uncommonly Wild 3 bulwark into a formalized sculptured park. And the city is finally building a second metro line to link the east and west sides of Warsaw, with stops at the most significant developments along the river. Thus it is in the last couple of years that the space along the river has emerged as one of a dizzying range of wildly contesting representations: from beaches for football fans and river bank luxury saunas to nesting places for migrating terns; from potential for developing Warsaw into an attractive destination or habitation point for an international jet-set to one for bottom up NGO activities or even a space where the power of nature (floods) threatens the security of human civilization.